World Trade Systems of the East and West: Nagasaki and the Asian Bullion Trade Networks

340 Pages·2017·2.69 MB·English

by  Geoffrey C. Gunn

World Trade Systems of the East and West
East and West
Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions
Edited by
Chuxiong George Wei (University of Macau)
VOLUME 2
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ewcd
World Trade Systems of the
East and West
Nagasaki and the Asian Bullion Trade Networks
By
Geoffrey C. Gunn
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover image: “Sueyoshi red seal ship in 1633, with foreign pilots and sailors.” Kiyomizu-dera Ema (絵馬)
painting, Kyoto.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017041331
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2467-9704
isbn 978-90-04-35855-3 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-35856-0 (e-book)
Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite
910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
Contents
Preface IX
List of Tables and Illustrations Xii
Glossary/Abbreviations Xiv
Note on Weights and Currencies Xviii
Introduction 1
Japanese Historiography 4
The East-Southeast Asian Bullion Trade Zone 10
The Book 17
1 Kyushu in the East Asian Trade Networks 19
Spanish Manila and the Galleon Trade 19
The Portuguese “Discovery” of the Kyushu Trade Networks 21
The Ryukyu Tribute Trade 28
Gold, Silver, and Copper Mines in Japan 32
Japanese Maritime Trade with China and Korea 37
The Portuguese Missionary Arrival in Kyushu 42
Conclusion 45
2 Merchants and Missionaries in the Foundation of Nagasaki 47
Nagasaki’s Obscure Origins 47
The Portuguese Merchant-Missionary Arrival in Nagasaki 49
Nagasaki under Jesuit Rule 53
The Manila-Japan Trade Connection 58
Return to Imperial Rule (1588) and Persecutions 62
Conclusion 71
3 Nagasaki and the Silk Trade 73
Setting the Scene on Silk Production and Procurement 73
Functional Aspects of the Macau-Nagasaki Silk Trade 78
The Portuguese Merchant Presence 87
The VOC Silk Trade with Tonkin 91
Conclusion 97
4 The Dutch and English at Hirado 99
The Dutch Establishment at Hirado (1609–41) 99
The Dutch and the Contest for Taiwan (1604–61) 103
vi Contents
The Zheng Family Dynasty 107
The Dutch Trade at Hirado 108
The English at Hirado (1613–23) 112
Conclusion 120
5 The Shimabara Rebellion (1637–38) Revisited 122
Background to the Rebellion 123
The Duarte Correa Manuscript and the First Stirrings of
Rebellion 125
The Battle for Shimabara 129
Millennial Rebels or Economic Victims? 135
The Anti-Christian Backlash 138
Conclusion 141
6 Nagasaki and the Southeast Asia Trade 143
Drawing the Contours of the “Red Seal” Trade 144
The Chinese Junk Trade at Nagasaki in the kai-hentai Records 149
Status of the Junk Traffic in 1664 157
Scale and Scope of the Nagasaki-Vietnam Trade 161
Conclusion 166
7 The Chinese of Nagasaki and their Social and Commercial
Activities 168
Origins of the Nagasaki Chinese Community under the Ming 168
Chinese Temple Communities in Nagasaki and their Functional
Role 174
The Zheng Trade with Nagasaki during the Ming-Qing
Transition 178
The Restoration of the China Trade under the Qing 184
The Seventeenth Century Chinese Legacy in Nagasaki 189
Conclusion 192
8 Nagasaki in the Age of Kaempfer 194
Kaempfer’s Nagasaki 195
Dutch Trade at Deshima 202
A Dutch West India Company Account of 1721–23 208
Carl Peter Thunberg’s Account of 1795 211
Closed Door under Foreign Pressure 216
Conclusion 218
Contents vii
9 Parameters of the Bullion Trade Economy Network 221
Portuguese Profits on the Silk-for-Silver Trade 222
Putting a Value on the Dutch and Chinese Bullion Trade 223
Portuguese and Dutch in the Global Copper Trade 229
Reassessing the Silver Drain from Japan, the Role of Arai
Hakuseki 236
Nagasaki and the Asian Bullion Trade Reprised 240
Conclusion 244
Global Economy and World System 244
Stagnant Japan, Rising Japan, or Mid-Tokugawa Crisis? 248
A Precocious Early Modernization? 254
Nagasaki’s Pioneer Role in Japan’s Industrialization 256
Bibliography 259
Index 285

Preface
The importance of Japan’s silver exports in meeting the country’s trade defi-
cit with China in the import of silk has long been recognized (Charles Boxer,
et al.). More recent research (Hamashita Takeshi) has also confirmed the global
preeminence of the central kingdom’s tributary trade network of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Importantly, Andre Gunder Frank has gone further
in asserting that, not only was the emerging world economy Asia-centered, but
that China was the ultimate “sink” for New World and Japanese bullion. A cor-
ollary of Frank’s argument is that, contrary to the thesis of Western hegemony
in the early modern period, European merchant adventurers attached them-
selves to the Asian locomotive, at least before the multiple Asian crises of the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In sum, this work seeks to correlate
local (Nagasaki) and national (Japan) history with Asian regional and global
history to test the important thesis that a unified global economy linked by
bullion exchange materialized in tandem with and even prior to the eruption
of Westerners into the Asia Pacific hemisphere.
With its superb natural harbor embedded in a southward curving peninsula
jutting from the north-western corner of the island of Kyushu and looking out to
the East China Sea, Nagasaki’s genesis as an international port was literally cre-
ated by Portuguese traders and Catholic missionaries arriving from Macau. For
almost one hundred years Nagasaki served as the terminal port of the Macau
ships and, over even longer time as the single designated site in Japan for the
conduct of trade by both the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the no less
significant Chinese junk trade. More generally, this study raises questions as
to the volume, the profitability, and the mechanism of the trade conducted at
Nagasaki, as well as the agency of the concerned merchants, whether Japanese,
European or Chinese? Another set of questions are also raised as to a stagnant
versus commercially dynamic Japan and, indeed, what manner of commercial
activity developed in seventeenth century Nagasaki under conditions short of
full-blown capitalist activity? At least two major perspectives emerge from this
investigation. First, contrary to the standard view that two centuries of isola-
tion confirmed a thesis of Western hegemony, in fact Tokugawa Japan offers
an exception to the decline thesis. Second, notwithstanding seclusion edicts
and trade curtailments, Nagasaki’s role in the regional Asian and even global
bullion trade leads us to rethink Japan’s so-called “closed country” policy from
within a world history framing.
I first produced this work as an in-house monograph of the Faculty of Eco-
nomics, Nagasaki University in the last year of the last century some four years
x Preface
after my arrival in the city better known for the atomic bombing of August 9,
1945. Needless to say, the intervening years have seen the addition of a small
number of contributions to this general field which have greatly encouraged
this revision and update. To this effect, I should signal Ishii Yoneo’s edited
translations of records relating to the junk trade linking Nagasaki with South
East Asian ports; Hoàng Anh Tuấn’s dissertation-turned book on the role of
the Dutch in the Vietnamese silk-for-silver trade; Hang Xing on the important
Zheng family networks; Shimada Ryūto writing on the Dutch trade in Japanese
copper, Keiko Nagase-Reimer addressing little-known mining issues through
Japanese literature; and the doctoral dissertation by Iioka Naoko highlighting
the role of Nagasaki-based Chinese merchant princes in the Tonkin silk trade,
along with a host of Japan specialists feeding into a larger field of studies.
As a neophyte stepping into this field, I soon became aware that debts
owed to Japanese scholars of this broad field are huge, reaching back to the
English writings of Murakami Naojiro as with his edited version of Richard
Cocks’ diary published in 1889. In the interwar years, he was joined by Muto
Chozo (武藤長蔵) whose name is lent to the extraordinary Muto collection
in the Nagasaki University Faculty of Economics library. Muto, in turn, was a
correspondent with famed historian of the Portuguese world, Charles Boxer,
inter alia author of major studies on the Portuguese trade with Japan. Neither
were British scholars of the English East Indian Company operation in Japan
backward as well. Commencing in the immediate prewar period, Iwao Seiichi
and, subsequently, Nagazumi Yoko, literally pioneered what we know today
about the seventeenth century “red seal” trade as well as the basic trade data.
From another tack, such economic historians as Kobata Atsushi, Kato Eichii,
and Tashiro Kazui, have also contributed greatly to this field of inquiry. At least
one of the most original, especially in theorizing the tributary trade system, is
Hamashita Takeshi, formerly of Tōyō Bunko.
Obviously, I am indebted to those who read old Dutch, Portuguese, classical
and modern Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese manuscripts and readings in
the original. As a synthetic study with broader interpretive issues in mind, my
sources are overwhelmingly drawn from Western language material, with the
exception of some commissioned Japanese translations. A particularly use-
ful source has been the “Deshima Diaries,” offering a daily record of Nagasaki
life over a 250-year period, with extracts translated into English by the Japan-
Netherlands Institute and painstakingly indexed. Much owes to Leonard Blussé
and other members of the “Leiden school” for this endeavor. My only other
major “primary” source is a rare manuscript recovered in Portugal bearing
upon the Shimabara rebellion. While Japanese sources certainly add a wealth
of detail on the trade conducted at Nagasaki, Chinese and Vietnamese-reading